


The Parnassian Blow

by Anonymous



Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Breaking the Fourth Wall, Canon Era, Enjolras makes a bad pun, M/M, Masturbation, Metafiction, Oral Sex, Sad Blowjobs, a somber quadriga of authorial fantasies delivered direct, implied Enjolras/Grantaire - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-19
Updated: 2013-09-19
Packaged: 2017-12-27 00:35:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/972203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Victor Hugo meets a striking young man in 1832, and works through his feelings thirty years and fourteen hundred pages later.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Parnassian Blow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dorkofagespast](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dorkofagespast/gifts).



Bahorel had pulled Victor out from between two columns and left him with Grantaire’s unconscious body in the Corinthe. Victor immediately affected the pose of holding one hand under his chin and looking grimly at the walls of the wine-shop while scribbling in his notebook, so as to give the proper impression. 

“Is he dead?” Victor asked, poking Grantaire’s shoulder with his pen. 

“His sleep may be sweet now but he’ll have the devil’s own hangover,” Bahorel said. “Stay put, good author, and you might be our Pheidippides yet. If you’ll excuse me, I hear singing from outside and they’re clearly short a baritone.”

Victor found himself abruptly alone; only their melancholy chief remained separate from his friends’ merriment, keeping his beautiful eyes on Victor’s pages. 

“I wrote _Hernani_.” 

“I have never read _Herman’s There_ ,” Enjolras replied. 

“ _Notre-Dame_?”

“I do not attend.” 

A mystic, then, who did not go to the theater or read fiction, yet was a harsh breath from Parnassus none the same. Victor wrote the thought down – it wasn’t too bad, albeit half-formed. 

“Why does my appearance matter?” Enjolras said. 

“It affects sentiment just as well in fiction as it does in person, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.” 

Enjolras made a dismissive noise. “What a shame my friend is passed out, as he’d give you a learned opinion on the topic. _In loco pictoris_ , I can only say that I hope you get my hair right, though my mouth will give you the most trouble.” 

The last was said with a strange half-smile that stayed with Victor long past the June Rebellion. Was the boy killed in the émeute? He must have been. There had been a report in _Le Moniteur_ about an insurgent who’d resembled Apollo, cornered and shot in a wine-shop. 

Victor became an old man with _Les Misérables_. He kept clumsily writing around Enjolras, and the queer dynamic between him and Grantaire, and if Enjolras really was a prophet: Victor kept returning to expand on Waterloo and the sewers, rather than write more of Enjolras’s impossible speeches. 

It was possible that Victor had nursed a passion for Enjolras. It was likely. 

Victor needed to work through it, or he’d never finish the book. He opened the draft to the most recent line, _A sort of stifled fire darted from his eyes, which were filled with an inward look. All at once he threw back his head, his blond locks fell back like those of an angel on the sombre quadriga made of stars, they were like the mane of a startled horse._ He crossed out ‘horse’ for ‘lion,’ and unbuttoned his trousers. Victor imagined how Enjolras would look in ecstasy – not the sublimity of the barricade, but the baser one of the bedroom – spread out for someone else’s pleasure, though Hugo dared not put himself in that place. 

The bald student had said Enjolras was a virgin. That mouth, tender and cruel by turns but always so, so, difficult, had never been kissed, and the thought drove Victor to stroke himself at his writing desk. His fantasy pressed Enjolras’s lips to Victor’s cock and turned the boy’s expression sweet; to imagine otherwise would have unmanned him. Victor came to that hollow image with a sense of embarrassment he hadn’t had since he was a boy. 

He finished the sentence from before, and added a line of dialogue: _“Citizens, do you picture the future to yourselves?”_

**Author's Note:**

> The secret to my output lately is apparently requests from gauzythreads. And feeling indirectly dared. I'm vaguely sorry about this fic, but also a little proud. All of the quoted lines from the Brick are from the Hapgood translation. 
> 
> 1\. Pheidippides was the name of the Greek messenger who ran from Marathon to Athens to announce that the Greeks had won against the Persians, yay. Then he died and apparently people felt inspired to start marathons. 
> 
> 2\. The Hernani/Herman's There joke is a terrible one that almost works in French and doesn't work in English at all - my apologies. Enjolras doesn't go to the theater and what kind of name is 'Hernani' anyway. 
> 
> 3\. Interesting note - Hugo's 'Notre-Dame' was published in 1831. You should've read it, Enjolras. 
> 
> 4\. Mt. Parnassus was associated with poetry and Apollo.
> 
> 5\. 'In loco pictoris' is a lame pun on the legal term 'in loco parentis,' meaning 'in place of a parent.' Enjolras is saying 'in place of the painter.'
> 
> 6\. The title is a reference to W. H. Auden's masterpiece, 'The Platonic Blow,' a poem about him giving a guy a blowjob.


End file.
